Living the Science Life

This is my general purpose blog, and over the years it has transformed from being a place for me to post the interesting science links I have come across in my internet travels to now all things web. With my move to twitter, and Paper.li, I have posted long form to the blog less and less, unless it is to document the things I am working on in graduate school or work. Since 2010, and probably until spring of 2014, I am completing a masters in Professional studies at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, while working full time at the Division of Educational Informatics at the NYU School of Medicine. It’s a full and rewarding schedule.

If you are interested in media, science media, animation, digital teaching materials, production, capture, art, design, new tech, gadgets…PLEASE CONTACT ME. [email protected] or at one of my many social media personas

Some Inspiring words from Science Writer, Dennis Overbye:

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.